


The Sun Himself

by anythingbutgrief



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Angst, Friendship, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-21
Updated: 2013-09-21
Packaged: 2017-12-27 04:31:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/974369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutgrief/pseuds/anythingbutgrief
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You could read." "I'm fucked for life anyway, man." About one Mickey Milkovich, the cave of his home, the light that burns him, and the person that forces him up a steep and rugged ascent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sun Himself

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: includes depictions of trauma from canonical sexual assault and references to drug abuse.

_“You could read.”_  
  
 _“Fuck off. I’m fucked for life anyway, man.”_  
  
Svetlana read.  
  
The night of the wedding, she came into the Milkovich house with a man Mickey thought he might have seen around the gun club before, whose neck had the circumference of a basketball and whose knuckles were always slightly bent halfway to a fist, even at rest. He had stared blankly at Mickey when he arrived at the front stoop carrying two large boxes, holding a cold gaze for a few seconds before pushing the door the rest of the way open with the force of his shoulders alone. Svetlana, still in her wedding dress, smiled weakly at Mickey when she passed into the house after him. Mickey didn’t move to take the box from her hands, just watched her as she followed the burly guy into what was once Mickey’s own room and slipped her box neatly under the bed. The man had knocked the boxes onto the ground with a thud, not looking to see the top flying open and sending two or three shirts scattering. The man said something to Svetlana in a low voice, handed her a piece of yellow paper, and left without saying a word to Mickey. Which was fine with Mickey.  
  
Svetlana sat on the edge of the bed, still for a moment, and then untied the knot holding her hair at the top of her head. Her hair came down in flat, lifeless strips curling around her chin. Her make-up was slightly smeared, and she sat with her hands clenched tightly together in her lap, but she looked up at Mickey warmly, maybe even hopefully. Mickey turned and shut the door to his—their—whatever—bedroom and shrugged out of the rest of his clothes. He’d already taken off the dumb bowtie and jacket, so it was short work until he was down to his boxers. He reached over into a drawer to pull out a tank, pushed it over his head, and climbed under the blanket and the sheets, curling his feet so that he wouldn’t brush up against Svetlana. He hadn’t even bothered to shut the lights off.  
  
She was still for a few moments, and he didn’t peak his head over the blankets to see what was happening when she started to move. But he could guess. He swallowed. _Just do it. Just do it. You’ve done it before. You can do it again. Just do it._ His body had started shaking, and Mickey told himself he had just drunk and smoked too much earlier and come down too fast. After the last rustling sounds ended, she slipped under the blankets across from him. Mickey steeled himself and chanced a look over. She wasn’t completely naked, not yet anyway, but the intent look in her eyes made him avert his gaze after less than a second.  
  
Mickey stared up at the ceiling with enough concentration that he was certain he could tear a hole through force of will given enough time. But the woman beside him said, “Mickey,” in a low voice and he felt his stomach swim up and down in his torso like a blind fish. He licked his lips and stared at the ceiling and tried to get his feet and fists ready and--  
  
Her hand touched his left shoulder and he jerked so violently he was sure he had to have hit her with the force of his flinching, but he didn’t care. He scrambled his limbs away from her, heart racing, head pounding, inner voice screaming something wordless and wormless.  
  
She had retreated completely, and yet Mickey’s blood still raced. His stomach cramped in three places and it felt like his torso had become entirely too small for the press of his guts pushing their way out. He tasted something bitter and tangy fill his mouth. Mickey swung his legs over the side of the bed and shoved his head in between his knees, wanting to gasp but feeling like his windpipe couldn’t even work enough to make him sound as weak as he was. More bile coursed up his throat. Mickey bent further down until his hands pressed flat against the ground and he stared expectantly at the darkness between his legs, surprised at seeing pointy edges of rectangles, blue and grey and white, against the dank netherworld under his bed. Three boxes of possessions in the whole world, and at least one-third of that was books. He laughed and spat something dark green out between his teeth, barely missing the pages a few inches away from his face.  
  
He hung that way for a few minutes, blood pooling in his head as he spat out the awful taste in his mouth. He felt dizzy, high without being high, and he liked it. He closed his eyes and relished the feel of some cool hair hitting his forehead and the sweaty tendrils of his hair. He savored that for a minute, until something wet and warm replaced it. He opened his eyes and saw the outline of a washcloth brushing against his face, patting against his forehead, and then another one came up to wipe his chin clean. After a minute, Svetlana spoke, and he realized that he had never really heard her do so before, not even at the wedding. Her voice was heavily accented but lucid. “I think you need to lie back down. Let me get to the floor.” He used his hands to push himself back up, grateful she didn’t pull him up herself. Svetlana wiped up the remains on the floor and took the cloths out of the room. Mickey closed his eyes and pretended that she wouldn’t come back. When she did, she paused near the bed but didn’t touch him. “Do you know where there is a spare blanket I can use?” Her voice was soft but not timid.  
  
“What, you gonna sleep on the floor?” Mickey tried his best to keep his voice disdainful, rather than spilling over with hope.  
  
“Unless you have a better idea,” she responded. He groaned and rubbed his own face. He thought for a minute, then stood up and walked to the closet. He pulled out the sleeping bag and laughed out loud. Svetlana didn’t ask why, but he wouldn’t have told her if she had. Ian had asked him, that day, if he was going to a sleepover. Now Mickey was really having one, just with the wrong person. “You want the blanket or the sheets?” he asked.  
  
Svetlana shrugged. Mickey scoffed and pulled one sheet into the sleeping bag with him, then zipped it up as much as he could by himself. He pulled his legs up to his chest in the bag, His bones were going to punish him for this tomorrow, but he used the position to stick his hands in between the space between his thighs, not to jack off but to pretend that it was someone else’s warmth he was reaching into.  
  
With his eyes screwed shut he was pulled back from the brink of sleep by the sound of Svetlana on her feet, padding carefully but not silently across the bedroom. Mickey tensed, every muscle in his body ready to punch or run or convulse into spasms again. But as soon as the footfall came around his side, it went right back around, and he felt the pressure of the bed changed as her weight dipped back inside. He heard her nails rake down something as solid as wood and lightly tap against whatever she was holding like rain against a roof, before opening it and running her hands across the pages. Mickey unclenched his muscles and fell asleep to the faint flipping sound of turning pages in the night.  
  
***  
She didn’t touch him, he didn’t touch her books. For the first few months, that was the basic balanced model of their marriage. He knew it wasn’t a trade, not really. Especially since he didn’t stay away from her territory. Which only served to show him that she would not want to touch his, anyway.  
  
Mickey picked one that has a soldier hunched over a huge shield. “The Iliad.” He’d heard of that before. He thought he might have even seen a movie about it once or twice. The size would have intimidated him a little if he had any intention of reading it start to finish. He saw how Svetlana read, though, using a red pen to mark sections off like she was studying for something. She’d probably pick out the good sections for him. Mickey immediately groaned when he realized upon opening the book that it was poetry. Or, at least it looked like poetry. Mickey absent-mindedly flipped through the first hundred or so pages. There was an asterisk here and there, but nothing particularly noteworthy…until he got to a section brandishing a huge star on the top of the page and several notes scrawled in girly handwriting, with a few lines covered in pink highlighter. Svetlana pointed to one line with three big arrows. Mickey took the hint and read from there:  
  
“But however it is, deep in my heart I know  
that a day will come when the sacred city of Troy  
will be devastated, and Priam, and Priam’s people.  
And yet it is not their anguish that troubles me so,  
nor Hecuba’s, nor even my father, King Priam’s,  
nor the blood of the many brave brothers of mine who will fall  
in the dirt at the hands of their enemies—that is nothing  
compared to your grief, when I picture you being caught  
by some bronze-armored Achaean who claims you and takes  
your freedom away and carries you off in tears.”  
  
“ _Алексе́й_ ,” Svetlana had written in the margin of this page. Mickey swallowed and moved down a few lines to another heavily-underlined place.  
  
“But may I be dead, with the cold earth piled up upon me,  
before I can hear you wail as they drag you away.”  
  
In the margins across from this passage, “ _Алексе́й. Алексе́й. Алексе́й. Алексе́й. Алексе́й. Алексе́й. Алексе́й_ ” came Svetlana’s dutifully neat handwriting, laying out the words on an imaginary straight line. The letters to the last three, however, were smudged. There were four fat stained splotches on the page. Mickey pressed his fingertip against one as though he expected it to still be wet from her tears. He heard some noise from elsewhere in the house. Svetlana or not, he shut the book quickly and shoved it back into its box. His father's voice echoed from the kitchen. Mickey considered a moment and kicked the book box another foot deeper underneath the bed.  
  
The next day he randomly chose one, and the book in question was hardcover, red, with strips of the binding hanging from the spine. It was an even less appetizing choice than the day before, a book of philosophy with one of those names everybody knew meant you had to be really smart to understand him. The book opened to a dog-eared section, again heavily underlined and marked with Svetlana’s notes. It was structured like a conversation between characters, but the sentences were boring and Mickey felt his focus slipping midway and kept having to retrace his steps. He blinked and started over. One guy was telling another guy a story about a world in which everyone was kept chained underground in some cave without direct light forever, so that all they ever knew was what shadows looked like. Then one prisoner is unchained and forced to the outside of the cave. Originally the bright light of the outside sears into him like a knife, like poison, like pepper spray thrown in the eyes for days on end. Because all he had ever known were shadows. Mickey’s mind had started wandering again by then, and he thought what that would be like, to live in the dark all the time, in a single position. He knew it was the wrong answer, the worse alternative, because that Socrates guy basically said it was, but the innermost part of his bones ached for it, ached to slink back into a place dark and warm and empty. Mickey closed his eyes and felt his shoulders slump forward and down, and then the rest of his body did, too, flattened like he was powerless. Like he was dead. He fell asleep with his face pressed uncomfortably against the pages.  
  
He awoke to the sound of his door opening. Mickey jerked his head up with a start and blinked alert at the tearing sound of the page responding to his motion. He grimaced down at the half-torn appearance of the page before becoming aware of Svetlana standing in the doorway.  
  
“Shit, shit,” Mickey said as he scrambled to his feet and moved to drop the book back into the box. Svetlana quirked an eyebrow up and moved to sit at the opposite end of the bed, a safe distance. She didn’t say anything but continued to stare at him. “Sorry, sorry, I was just.” He shrugged. “Whatever.”  
  
“Reading?” she offered, smiling, and that made Mickey scowl, like the idea of him reading was somehow so hilarious. “Whatever,” he muttered again.  
  
Svetlana nodded, face gone slack again. “Can I ask what you were reading?” Her voice had that edge of caution to it that must have reminded him of someone else, because it was making him sick. He’d rather she yell at him about the torn page or say nothing.  
  
Mickey leaned down to retrieve the book and tossed it, probably with a little too much force, toward Svetlana’s lap. She opened it back up to the ripped page. “The allegory of the cave,” she murmured, moving her fingers along the page as though she knew it by touch rather than vision.  
  
“Yeah. Sorry about the page or whatever.” Mickey was going to have to start up a shot tally for every time he resorted to using that word with this woman.  
  
“Had you ever read this before?”  
  
Mickey didn’t know if it was an accusation or prelude to judgment, but he either didn’t care or was so good at pretending that he’d fooled himself by this point, so he just shook his head. She kept pushing her fingers over the page. “It’s meant to stand in for people learning reason.”  
  
“So?” She obviously wanted to keep talking.  
  
“So the idea is that, as humans we’re so unable to see things as they really are, that when we finally do, it’s incomprehensible to us. And if anybody does get to the truth, and get to understanding it, the rest of us are still so in the dark that we punish them for it.”  
  
“Huh.”  
  
Svetlana nodded. “Yeah. All of us just…in the dark.”  
  
“Some more than others,” Mickey muttered, surprising himself. His tongue immediately shifted back an inch closer to his throat, cowed by its own disobedience.  
  
Svetlana glanced at him for a moment and pushed the book back across the bed. “I think I’m going to make dinner. You can keep reading if you want.”  
  
He didn’t look down at the book again until the door was safely shut and he felt confident she wasn’t going to burst right back in.  
  
Svetlana had written in red letters in the margin: truth HURTS.  
  
Then he turned the page. truth is BEAUTIFUL.  
  
Mickey bit down on his lip and wished he could force himself to taste blood, his own dead skin, anything but the memory of Gallagher.  
  
***  
Mickey came in from a run at 4 AM. His knuckles burned and there was a sore spot on the gum above one of his canines from a particularly distasteful punch that he couldn’t stop poking with his own tongue. He wanted very badly to get very drunk and almost laughed when he saw Svetlana sitting on the couch, looking down at a small stack of papers and cradling a long thin bottle of vodka in her hands. He thought, out of nowhere, that he could love her, the way one old tired dog loves another one that shares his porch without getting too close. Or the way two fishermen lock eyes once a year and nod at each other over an expanse of black water between them. He walked across the space to his/their/no one’s room and smiled at the familiar ache of his bones.  
  
As if in intentional violation of the quiet peace of that thought, Svetlana quickly stood up from her seat and marched over with the stiff legs of a weary and determined soldier to slip a letter in his hand, then stood impossibly straight-backed as he looked down to see Gallagher’s name written across the envelope.  
  
He must have had sand poured into his throat, based on the way it felt when he tried to speak.  
  
“It has your name on it.”  
  
She nodded and gestured for Mickey to go the rest of the way into the bedroom. “Yes. But it’s for you.” She turned and walked away, shutting the door behind her.  
  
He held the envelope between his fingertips, like he was afraid he’d bruise it with too much of his skin. Mickey went to open the seal and frowned at finding it broken already.  
  
“Dear Svetlana,  
  
I hope it’s okay that I’m writing to you. The last time you saw me I was yelling out rude things at your wedding reception, and the time you saw me before that was even worse. Mandy said to me in a letter that you were pretty smart, so I’m guessing you can figure that out.  
  
I’ve had some time to think, though, and I realize what happened couldn’t have been your fault. So I’m sorry.  
  
Anyway, I realize that leaving wasn’t the best thing to do. He needed me. I don’t think I was able to give him what he needed. Maybe I should have still tried. I worry about him all the time. He’s probably drinking too much and getting into trouble in other ways. He probably hasn’t even talked to you about it.  
  
I don’t know how to write this. I know it’s going to sound stupid, but if you help him get away from his father, I’ll do anything you need me to, when I can. Money, or a job, or whatever. I don’t know what you want, but I’d get it, if you got him away from there. He can’t do it by himself.  
  
Please write me back.  
  
Ian.”  
  
Mickey stood up slowly. Now it felt like all of the fluids in his body had been replaced with limb-clogged mud. He opened the door to the bedroom and saw Svetlana waiting a foot outside of the room.  
  
“When did you get this?” Mickey’s voice comes out in a croak.  
  
Svetlana twisted the band around her fourth finger in violent circles. “A month ago.” She shook her head and grimaced. “Six weeks.”  
  
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Mickey hated that he went to yelling at her so quickly, that it took so little to take him there, and he hated that a part of her shrunk from him even though he was still halfway across the room.  
  
Svetlana shook her head, he guessed at her own recoiling, and moved into the room. “What good would it have done? Upset you even more? Why would I do that?” Mickey stared at her incredulously at that for a moment, his jaw open and ready to launch into a spiel. I didn’t come here for you, Ian had said that day. He had half-smirked at Mickey’s uselessness and turned away. The moment Mickey was waiting for had arrived. Ian had realized what a fucking worthless loser he was. And yet in the letter Ian talked about Mickey like maybe still there was hope, like maybe still he was worth fighting for. Mickey clenched his jaw and wanted to scream at Svetlana about how much he needed to know that, but he bit his lip instead. She couldn’t have known.  
  
“There was no point then anyway. He didn’t have a chance to get my letter until now.”  
  
“You wrote him back?” Mickey felt like his chest was on fire. He felt like something huge and hot and merciless was bearing down on his heart.  
  
“Yes. I told him…I told him we would leave, but I didn’t have the money. He’s going to wire some…”  
  
“You told him you would take his money? What the fuck is wrong with you?” Gallagher didn’t have any money to give. He imagined him giving up whatever tiny wages he was making, or worse, dipping into the amount he’d hidden for years in his own house, and felt the contents of his stomach surge south. He’d have to get Mandy to take care of it. Mickey stormed past Svetlana toward the door. “Fucking Russian whore.”  
  
Svetlana grabbed him by the hood of his sweatshirt and tugged on it until Mickey turned back around. “You do not ever call me a whore.” Mickey hardened his expression at her, that ridiculous stern face she was pulling and that single finger she had pointed toward Mickey’s face like a cross schoolteacher. A wave of accusations rumbled in his chest, unspoken and only half-thought. He couldn’t say what his body did so often, even when she was farther away than she was now. He couldn’t say, “You did something bad to me. You did something bad to me and I don’t know what to call it but it was fucked-up and I hate you for it.” Instead he just stared back at her for several seconds before saying. “You fuck for a living.” Ian’s words felt sick on his tongue, and he smiled meanly to conceal the grimace that twisted his mouth.  
  
Svetlana’s nose and upper lip raised in a snarl. “You do not ever call me a whore,” she repeated, voice desperate even as her face got rougher. “Do you hear me? Never. Never! You never—” She turned and backed away toward the bed, facing the window. Mickey heard a wet cracking sound come from her throat and he wondered how long it had been since she last cried.  
  
Watching her shoulders rise and fall in an even, measured pattern, Mickey stood still against the wall for a minute. She dashed at her face with her hands, and Mickey felt his feet move forward as if by their own accord. What was the right thing to do when you make your wife cry by calling her a whore? Hold her? The thought made Mickey want to throw up. Take her hand? The last time he’d done that, it was a lie. He sat beside her instead, without touching. “I’m sorry,” he said in a low, flat voice.  
  
“No, you’re not,” she replied without hesitation. He considered fighting it, but he didn’t. She spoke instead. “I’m sorry for what happened. What Ian meant in the letter. I’m sorry for that.” Mickey wanted to open his mouth and shoot back, “No, you’re not,” just like she had. But that would have been a lie, too. She was sorry. He could feel it in her voice, in the stiff way she lowered herself into bed at night, in the dead way she’d stare at herself in the mirror before going to work, in the old scar at the crook of her left arm. Mickey wondered if she’d shot up herself or if some pimp had done it to make her a more manageable piece of merchandise. It was a battle scar, regardless. He eyed the empty plastic bags littering the floor under his side of the bed with the accompanying beer cans and felt something sharp sting at his eyes. He forced the bottom of his palms harshly into his eyes. He was full of longing to know, suddenly, who Алексе́й was, and if he had died before Svetlana had been dragged off in tears. “I’m sorry,” he said again, his voice full. This time she did not argue.  
  
“You need to write him.”  
  
“Tell him I’m okay?”  
  
“Yeah. Lie to him,” Svetlana said dryly, and Mickey laughed through his hands.  
  
He bit on his tongue for a full minute before speaking. “Svetlana…I need you to give me a gift.”  
  
***  
Ian held the envelope in his hand for a moment, passing his fingers over it almost reverently, somehow in awe over the idea that Mickey had touched this, and now it was touching him. He inhaled sharply and slipped his finger under the seal, shutting his eyes and preparing himself for “fuck off” or “leave me alone,” or worse, “you left me.” Instead he read:  
  
“Gallagher--  
  
I’m fucked when it comes to words. I think this says more than I could."  
  
Beneath Mickey’s writing was a crumpled piece of paper obviously yellowed with age and misuse. He squinted at the running head and smiled in bemusement when he recognized the title. Plato’s Republic. Ian had read some version of this in school before.  
  
Mickey had bracketed a chunk of text halfway down the page: “And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he’s forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.” Ian moved his finger across the text until he got to where someone had underlined “the sun himself.” Then again under the words “the light” in the next sentence. Arrows from the two phrases led to the same place in the margin, where, in tiny cramped script, Ian discerned a repeating chain of one word in Mickey’s handwriting:  
  
 _“You. You. You. You. You. You. You.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Quotes taken from Book 6 of the Iliad, lines 443-452 and 463-464 (Stephen Mitchell's translation) and Plato's The Republic.


End file.
